


Buttercups and pearls

by elephant_eyelash



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Absent Parents, Child Abuse, Childbirth, Emotional Abuse, Gen, Illegitimacy, Motherhood, Physical Abuse, Prostitution, Traumatic childbirth, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-17
Updated: 2012-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-07 23:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gendry's childhood, told partly from the POV of his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buttercups and pearls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [comradeocean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/comradeocean/gifts).



They called her Buttercup for her yellow hair.  
  
He liked her to pour it over his chest. He liked her smallness underneath him, the wriggling and the squirming, like an animal caught in a snare. He also liked her laugh, the dirt and the smoke of it, hissing through her teeth. He'd bring her Dornish wine and by dirty tallow light they'd sing songs with thick tongues. He liked to hold her by the thighs, so tiny was she, that it left bruises all over her in the morning. She called it the King's pearls.  
  
///  
  
She was glad of it, in a way. A King's baby was the best she could have ever wished for. For a short time she entertained ideas of being his mistress, moving into the Red and dressing her and the baby in silks and satin. But he had just laughed and patted her on the head like a child. The rage overcame her ("that temper" she could hear her Mother say, "is going to get you in trouble"), at the way the laugh pitied her, this girl from Flea Bottom with nothing but her yellow hair. After that she never saw him again when her little rosebud mouth had spat ugly, misshapen words at him instead of opening, soft and pliable to his fingers, his mouth, his cock. His stench stayed on her skin for what seemed like days, and his pearls remained.  
  
///  
  
A man with crooked teeth and yellowed fingers came to see her one night. He told her she would be paid a small sum for her child if she spoke of it to no-one. It stung her pride but she was thirsty. Men had stopped coming by to her once they felt that bump against them, the silhoutte of a foot pressing there, the unwelcome addition to her body that withdrew the coin from her palm. Her body had shapeshifted. More than once she thought of cleansing, of scraping the demon out of her, but she had no coin for it. She tried starving it, drowning it in wine, but he lived on, wriggling and forcing his growth inside of her. She knew then it was going to be like it's Father.  
  
She twirled the coin in between her fingers. It grew warm as she pressed it deep into her skin until she could feel the King's face burn.  
  
///  
  
He clawed his way out of her, tearing her from the inside, breaking the body she had once thought hers'. The midwife had said he was the biggest baby she had ever seen. She cut the cord herself, chopping away, trying her best to sever it with the dull blade as the midwife looked on, frightened. The baby screamed. No satins for you, she thought. The old hag wiped the shit and blood off him and gave him to her breast. He drank hungrily, knives piercing through her as he consumed, drained. He was hungry for me there too, she thought.  Yes, yes, he was just like his Father, feeling the old bruises re-emerge and bloom underneath his mouth.  
  
///  
  
He was big, strong, handsome, healthy. All the Mothers loved him, but not her, never her. She watched him suspiciously, always. She watched for his face to metamorphosise into his.  
  
No-one called her Buttercup anymore. She had had no name for him, so she decided to let the midwife name him. 'Gendry' had meant 'strong one' in some old, broken language. And he was strong. Grimm had noticed and had the boy arm-wrestling with sailors willing to bet their coin on beating a small boy. But the boy didn't like Grimm, the way he bent his Mother's body over and pinched her until she squeaked and brought men in to lie on top of her. He would grow stronger, he willed, and stop her howling.  
  
///  
  
'Bastard' meant unwanted. 'Bastard' meant you had no name. You carried the mark on you, invisible but ever expanding, until it covered your whole body like a second skin He knew these unspoken truths, learned them gradually like other boys learnt play. All the boys he knew were bastards, sons of women like his Mother who lurked in doorways with rouged cheeks. There were never any Fathers here. Fathers came and disappeared like shadows meeting sunlight.  
  
But silently he willed his Father to be alive, to be waiting to rescue him. He would be wrapped in chains in a darkened cave somewhere, dreaming of him as he did, living on rainwater and moss. He'd return with the heart of the troll that had kept him away for so long, and they would all feast on it, charred and blackened with cherries and wine. His mouth watered.  
  
"Why don't I have a Father?" He asked once. His Mother pursed her lips slightly from where she was bent over, trying to scrub the dirt stains off her clothes.  
  
"Course you have a Father." She said. "You can't be born without a Father."  
  
Gendry squinted in the sun. "Then why am I a bastard if I have a Father?"  
  
"Because he fucked me and then fucked off. He squirted you into my belly, is all." She said, her hands blistering in the water.  
  
"Did he know about me?"  
  
"Stop with these questions, they're no good for you or for me." She sighed.  
  
Gendry looked to the sky.  
  
"You look like him." She said quietly.  
  
"Really?"  
  
"I see him in you every day." She said, basket resting on her hip. She ran her eyes up and down her son. Then their eyes met, blue with brown, and all she could see was him. It was all she had been able to see since the day he was born. If only the eyes had been hers', she may have been able to forgive him, but no, the blue was just the same, the same eyes that had burned into her that day in the tavern. And here he stood, this boy for coin, who had savaged her from the inside.  
  
"And I hate it." She finished.  
  
///  
  
"You can't touch him." Grimm had said. "We get coin from his cunt of a Father. It'll be no good if he's battered and bruised."  
  
He'd heard people use the word 'whore' about his Mother. He usually didn't like playing with the other children, preferring to keep to himself and explore the city. But the words still floated over the cramped courtyard. It was an ugly sounding word, like dirt ground in his mouth, unclean and sticky feeling, but he had still asked what it meant.  
  
Her breath was nothing more than a mist of wine, her nails like knives. All he could see was her mouth, her teeth as fangs, hungry for his blood and not understanding why, why she hated him so much. Afterwards Grimm had belted him too for saying it, but it didn't hurt as much (they were controlled, his beatings, not like hers', fierce and endless seeming). His skin hardened underneath the leather. He would not cry, would not cry, ever.  
  
Later that night she cried and wailed, as she usually did when the day was disappearing. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to imagine his Father. He would be a giant and would scoop them both up in his arms and say sorry for forgetting about them. He would rest back into his chest and feel safe and warm against the smell of iron and the scratch of his beard.  
  
And in the distance, a castle would be waiting for them, warm and coral pink in the sunset.  
  
///  
  
She grew thin, grey.  
  
 Grimm had disappeared. He had sneered at the way the fever made her body bend and contort. She kept to her bed and cried from pain, a long thin sound that seemed to stretch on and forever. There was bleeding from wounds that never healed and thirst and fever. No maester wanted to touch her. They said she was unclean and no hand should dare grace that house. His neighbours tutted and called it the pox. The hunger twisted into him, and his face burned with shame when he had to beg, or worse, steal. Stealing was something men like Grimm did, not him.    
  
In the guttering light his Mother looked like a little girl. Her hair was as thin and dry as straw. Gendry ran his fingers carefully through it, trying to tease out the knots. She sang one of her old songs, scratching the words out from deep within. He held her hand like a wounded animal. He lit candles to the Stranger and begged for an easy death. He listened to her rattled breathing as he lay on the ground and cursed everything.  
  
///  
  
He stood vigil for her alone.  
  
He asked the Silent Sisters questions but they did not answer, and he hated them for it. He wanted to know about life and death, about how his mother's body would change in the ground. He kept a lock of her hair because he needed something and they had nothing. He waited by the door for the silhoutte of his Father the Giant come to light a candle for her but all there was was rain, dirty rain and choking heat. And at that point, with the scent of her pus perfurming the air above all the layers of piss and wine and mouldy straw he knew he was never going to come, this man to rescue him from this place.  
  
///  
  
They took his home, his life, his Mother all in an instant. The house was gutted out. He watched from the courtyard, numb with confusion and a sense of loss he could not trace. Then a man took him by the hand and led him to Iron Street. He was put in a bed and told to sleep, and he did.  
  
///  
  
He was a hard looking man with hands so big Gendry was sure the sun could be swallowed in them. He shortly introduced himself and slid a bowl of brown to him. Gendry stared at it in wonderment for a moment, before picking up his spoon and devouring every bit, trying to push back the hunger. Afterwards he was sick for a while, but his head still felt dizzy with the food. The man watched him suspiciously, like Gendry had done something wrong.  
  
"When was the last time you had a bath, boy?"  
  
Gendry shrugged. He probably stunk, but in Flea Bottom it was hard to distinguish one smell from the rest. The bitter smell of embers consumed the forge and above it he noticed his scent for the first time, the stale odour of his body, the stench of death. He blushed and scrubbed himself until his skin turned pink and raw. The bed was stiff and uncomfortable but clean, like his new body. He was making himself anew, slowly etching away the invisible marks made on his skin. The world became cleaner and more precise. Tobho didn't love him, but he didn't beat him, and he knew, truly, that no one had ever loved him, though mothers were supposed to, though true mothers were not meant to make bastards either.  
  
He climbed atop the shop. The sun settled over the land and touched everything: the Red Keep, where the King and knights and people of the tales lay, to the ground where his Mother slept, to the distance of lands with names he could not speak.


End file.
